Amanda Ho, a third-year new media design major from Bedford, N.H., wins $500 in Tiger Bucks, and visitors can receive a free copy of her poster during the festival on April 28.

“I think it’s pretty cool that I won,” Ho said. “I definitely was not expecting to win, so that’s cool. I’m happy that I could continue the new media design legacy of winners for this poster contest.”

More than three dozen entries were submitted and thousands of votes were cast in the contest.

Ho entered the competition as a design class assignment to follow the contest’s theme, “Experience the Future.”

“We were allowed to explore the phrase in any way we wanted to,” she said. “When I was creating this poster, I was looking for a lot of futuristic art that showed far away versions of today’s society. A lot of cyberpunk art influenced my design, but I wanted to give my design a more optimistic look as opposed to typical cyberpunk art that can be dark and cold.”

Ho named her entry “Tomorrow looks different than yesterday,” because she said the future looks different than the past.

“When I thought about Imagine RIT and ‘Experience the Future,’ the idea of a journey came to me,” Ho said. “I think of Imagine RIT as a place that is the central hub for new innovations and technology where people travel to and from different places. I wanted to elevate that idea by exploring the concept of futuristic cities and possibly an idea of what a futuristic Imagine RIT would look like. I wanted it to be left up to the viewers’ interpretation as to whether this is what Imagine RIT actually looks like or if it is what the boy on the poster imagines it to look like.”

All of the entries in this year’s poster contest can be seen on the festival website.

The winning poster for the 2018 Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival, designed by Amanda Ho, a third-year new media design student from Bedford, N.H.